After a year of residency behind me, I seek a new outlet for processing. Getting hammered with my coworkers has become a favorite past time, but the sorrows just learn to swim.
Sometimes I return home with an image or short clip that keeps replaying itself. Like staring into a projector, maybe playing a horror movie.
My prompt for the day is a dying child.
When the operator calls a "code blue," only those in the know can hear the subtle urgency in her robotic voice, just milliseconds accelerated from her normal bland overhead page. I suppose most folks don't know that code blue means "everybody run, someone just died!" We bolt as a team and arrive to find a nurse pumping a dead child’s chest.
Code blues are a peculiar realm of social space. When the patient comes from a nursing home, skin tented on bones, CPR in progress, no one cries. No surprises here, just the train arriving at its destination. Makes it easy for us to pretend we’re just at work, maybe practice a morbid procedure, crack jokes, have a laugh. Granny finally croaked and we all know there’s nothing we can do about it except follow the algorithm and pronounce her.
I had never before seen a freshly dead body with so few years lived through it.
A pediatric code blue crushes spirit, especially when the kid doesn’t make it. A withered seedling. Even with nowhere to plant it, it calls out for a chance to grow another set of leaves. Never even sharing the garden with the seed stalk that just tipped and is succumbing to rot.
In the work, we become entrenched with the child’s spirit as its attachment through flesh weakens sinew by sinew. When death's grip ultimately triumphs and our defeat declared, it is only above our best, though failed, efforts to chain this living spirit to its body.
No jokes. No high-fives for a line quickly placed or a nice intubation.
Where an adult life would have been declared over, we continue on with a child. Surely past any rational point, just to KNOW that we really gave it our all.
No jokes. No high-fives for a line quickly placed or a nice intubation.
Where an adult life would have been declared over, we continue on with a child. Surely past any rational point, just to KNOW that we really gave it our all.
It’s in the attachment where suffering comes from, just as the Buddhists have told me. When I face this again, I will once again choose suffering. Otherwise, I’m stuck being a mechanic.
